Of Fire and Gold
by dragondark
Summary: Drabble III: Hao's second life, and a prophecy of treachery.
1. Anna: space for regret

Notes: Moment is set shortly after Yoh promises to drop out of the Shaman Fight in exchange for Ren's life. Written for LiveJournal's 31 Days - the first in a series of Shaman King drabbles.

**Space for Regret**

_Where now are kings and where  
are the men who passed this way before you?_  
- August 27th

Reflecting, the old kings are lined in rows longer than her prayer beads, half-shapes against a color that blind eyes might see. As she looks, her mind's eye shatters the power that holds the world into fragments of old lives, memories and people that she has never trusted. They have only been men; now, only voices barely full in the dark. But then, they have never promised justice or kindness, only strength to build to their cause.

She trained him, and trusted him, and never thought that it would be the other kind of strength that he would need at the end. And all of the gentleness she has loved in him (but hardly valued) has broken the only dream he created for her that she has ever understood. She thinks of the life bought back with the blankness of unpracticed emotion, knowing, words sharper than thought, that it was the only path he saw through the dark. But she recognises by the tautness between his shoulder blades that he regrets the price. (Yoh is the only language she knows - clearer than Japanese or the spells she learned as a child: to bind and conjure, to break and shape.)

And though Anna has taught herself, too, of the dangers of weakness, she feels a fraction of ease that at least he won't fall by the wayside of the dangers that confront the Shaman Kings.

**end**


	2. Hao: three facets of desire

author's note: Strange how I'm most productive with fic when I can least afford to be. (Essay! Notes! Essay!) Hao introspection that didn't turn out nearly as well as I had hoped, and it's wiiiildly out of character, but there's something in it that I like - a facet, maybe? Or maybe the fact that it's a lot simpler than Deconstruction, which is going to be a lot of fun if I get the mindgames right, confusing prologue notwithstanding.

Also implied Hao/Anna to a certain extent, which is always nice.

**-**

**-**

**three facets of desire**

i. _Wanting is a strange movement of the heart._

It's not like ambition, which Hao understands and uses as fuel and flame and all else that he needs. Desires shift and change, suiting to some inner craving of which the wish he fulfills is only part.

He takes some minor amusement in granting all the small pieces of desire that people ask of him, in seeing all the space beneath their bones that they cannot fill. (Idly, he imagines their hands undergoing a slow transformation to sand, their eyes milky with marble blindness in seeing what they want.)

How they wander without asking direction perplex him, like puzzles constructed without end in view. Surely to know what you want should be simple as the heartbeat, the turn of greed in the throat - but their endless searches, fruitless and blind, have never concerned him. It isn't his business if people play without naming stakes.

Neither does it matter if men with wishes of wax and feathers take flight, forgetting the sun.

-

-

ii. _Emptiness in the heart opens to a glance where desire should be._

Despite all that he does, or perhaps because of it, that terrible need which consumes others is alien to him. He sees the way they fall, the fierce brightness that lights their faces, and answers it with the paths he sees before him: roads paved in bone, mortared with the blood of those who oppose him. What they want seems to be something else entirely, and the shape of that thought is strange and angular.

He dreams rarely, and does not speak of them when he does. The dreams he will explain are ambitious, and shaped of him like the crook of his elbow, the sidelong tilt of his eyes. He asks only for the sky open above him, the position of Shaman King, the drifting burst of light before fire snatches another precious object from the grasp of the world. Things that he might see when he wakes, pieces in a game larger than the world moving as he commands.

That knowledge weighs on him, not in satisfaction - which indicates some lesser state before it came - but quiet pleasure, without definition or understanding. Perhaps that is the root - that he is not satisfied - but he doesn't care enough to ask.

-

-

iii. _The irony of need is that it is never for what can be had._

Anna bemuses him in the same way, the same strange parallels. Not the girl herself, so tightly wound with her power that she trails it in long drifts like smoke wherever she passes, but the absent-minded desire to reach for her in the mornings, to slip into Yoh's place and watch the taut fierceness of her gaze directed at the world for him. It's nothing like need, an emotion that slips from the mind as if water, but that there's substance to it at all - that desire to watch Yoh's face as Anna turns her back on him - is unfamiliar.

He does not ask, does not consider whether he wants her because Yoh has her, or Yoh has her because Hao wants her.

In the end, it won't matter.

-

-

end

**-**

**feedback**: aside from telling me how out of character Hao is, crit is always appreciated.


	3. Hao: the seer

disclaimer: has been set up in the previous chapters, so I won't say it again. You know the gist anyway.  
note: Goodness, I haven't updated this batch of drabbles in a really long time. I should probably set something up for the xxxHolic _Paper Fortunes_, too. This is set somewhere around Hao's second life -- a tiny snippet. Well, maybe not so tiny. Also, a prophecy.

Haven't written SK in ages, so I'm a little rusty. Forgive any errors (but point them out).

* * *

**-**

**the seer**

-

The seer is crouched by the pool as he drifts into her cave.

She draws her fingers through the water in a loose circle. Her thin robe puckers open at her shoulder, and she looks over the curve of bare skin to the noise at the entrance. He meets her glance without hesitation and follows the slipping gaze as her eyeless face tilts at an angle a little away from him.

She is very beautiful. The flaw of her gaping eyesockets only serves to concentrate an odd holiness into her features: hair a blaze of darkness curving over her spine, her arching brows promising the distance of prayer, her thin mouth wearing the consecrated jealousy of a goddess.

"It is the custom," she says to his silence, "of our tribe: to blind our prophets, that they might see."

He cocks his head to a side. Long hair feathers down to cloak his shoulder down to his elbow. "And did you put yourself willingly through that honor?"

She pulls her fingers from the pool. Her hands wringing water is, for a moment, the only sound that exists. Each splattered drop echoes like a slap.

"You come to ask me for something that I will not give," she says. "Your distractions will not avail you. I have nothing to say to you."

He smiles, and the hiss of his mouth unfurling resounds, too, between the narrow walls. He walks precisely three steps from her side and kneels by the pool; the water twists his face into a monster's. "Will you not consider it again? Surely you have little love for the hands that held the instrument to burn out your eyes, for the rituals that chain you here, bound to speak fortunes to every passerby. No matter," he adds with a little laugh, catching the little spark in her tightening movements, "how you might loathe them."

"You seek to change something that has already been determined," she says, watching the water with him, "and I will have no hand in that. I will not throw myself against stone in the hopes that my bones might breach its walls. The names of those who are not shaman are written in the skies of the future in the language of fire."

At his side his fingers twitch. "Ah," he says, "but I know a little of fire."

"The nature of fire is changeless."

"The nature of fire," he says, "is to _destroy_." He turns. "If I cannot convince you," he says. She flings out a hand as if the gesture itself might stop him.

"Wait!" she cries, and he does. "Do you not desire your future, the weight and knowledge of it?"

"Not quite," he says, but her fists are clenching at her side; her lids are shutting over her empty eyes. He wonders, a little idly, what she sees.

"Oh, king of kings, you will have glory. But your ultimate goal will never be fulfilled; the world will return every impression that you have ever made on it. You will be broken," she hisses, "against time itself. Death will take you before age will, but it is blood that will betray you. You will invite treachery into your blood and treachery will run true. Your mother has left you, your tribe has cast you out, but you will find blood to share again, and faced with it you will shatter yourself. All your precious companions will leave you for shadow or will run from you when you turn."

A silence draws itself out between them.

"How cryptic," he says, smiling wider. "The nature of prophets, I suppose." He lingers by the edge of the pool, drawing his gloves from his belt to tug them on. "But, you see, you have told me nothing I did not already know. It is a cruel leader who demands followers when he is too weak to guide them where they should go. I would not ask them to follow me if I were." His eyes light with the promise of the future. He breathes, " Do you know what comes next, little seer?"

She does not answer.

His fingers slide through, and close in a fist. The water in the pool explodes into chips of ice and burns.

At his side, the seer makes a small noise, finding the hairs on her skin altering slowly to fire. Fire climbs her skin, crackling up her arms and down her throat when she opens her mouth to breathe. Fire snarls in her hair and swings down her back to crawl across her robes, a gradual river of flame in which she drowns. Fire claims last her hollow eyes, fixed inexorably on his still ones as she howls her death.

"You see," he says conversationally as the flames gutter and weave through her bones, "destiny cannot be changeless. Our natures are deeper than fate would ever allow. Every man has within himself the possibility of change." He smiles a little, tracing the path of an ember through the growing ashes. "Or the possibility of refusing it."

When it ends, he dusts the ash from his robes and walks from the cavern. If his dreams are troubled by the eyeless seer and her prophecy, he does not remember them when he wakes.

-

**end**

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**feedback**: makes me preen whenever I see it, regardless of whether it's praise or criticism. So. 


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